The Great What If - From the Vault 2006

This is an odd little alternate history scribble found during my latest chunk of dragging through Ye Olde Blog for anything worth keeping. It's a bit daft and a lot of wishful thinking but amusing, I think.

It's also an interesting little precursor to the fictional magazine pieces I wrote for Walking in the Shadowlands - practice, perhaps?

The universe is odd: I am posting this now almost a decade since it was posted, and on Jim's 73rd birthday and Lennon's anniversary - this was not by design. Not mine, anyway.





The Great What If?

London, England. August 2006. ---- Magazine

Jim Morrison is, in the words of one of his companions, in fine fooling today. On his annual holiday to England, Morrison is also making a very perfunctory attempt at plugging his latest volume of poetry.

It is usual at this point in articles of this kind to enumerate the ways in which the subject has altered since his heyday. First off, Morrison is sober. Jim has never spoken publicly about the last time he had a drink, but his detox days are believed to have begun in the summer of '71, right here in England.

In the days since then, he has lost his beer gut, lost the beard and regained a little of both occasionally. Currently, he is remarkably svelte for or man, his age (63 in December) and clean-shaven. His hair has been long since his Doors days, but it now has a goodly percentage of silver which, probably to his credit, he doesn't bother covering up like some thumbs-up popsters.

He became a father in 1974 for the first and only time and his son Dion (short for Dionysus of course, and probably a source of grief for the poor kid at school), is now thirty-two and as handsome as his father ever was as he accompanies Jim on his holiday.

More crucially, the music has changed since back in the day. It's still about death and sex of course, but the wily old man has honed and refined the message. He's still railing against the established order of things, even after his failed attempt for the US presidency in 1980.

"I had no illusions about winning and I didn't even want to win. I just wanted to shake and stir things, create some noise and have my questions answered. I was the youth candidate and the youth vote was up for the first time in years. Man, only in politics is a guy of thirty-seven considered young."

Youth, as he sips at San Pellegrino, is Jim's current bugbear, his latest pet peeve.

"They're just wasting it, man, like Shaw said. I don't meant they shouldn't go out and go crazy- I'd be a hypocrite if I said that, but... they're mostly so unconnected and uncaring about the world, you know? They don't stand for anything, they don't believe in anything, and you can be pretty sure it's our fault."

So, does Jim's anger rest on the shoulders of his own generation rather than the new one?

"Absolutely. We're the greatest wasted opportunity in centuries. We had the world in our hands and sold it out worse even than our own parents. We killed the Kennedys, we killed Dr King! I feel more affinity now with the generations before and after my own than mine. Why don't you all f...f... fade away?"

Jim gives a throaty chuckle at his own sardonic joke, and I am reminded of the other great difference since the good/bad old days: he's found peace with himself. Not with the rest of the world, but with himself. He's got comfortable with his own face, with his own soul and with his own weaknesses. He swears he'll never talk publicly about his battles against the inner demons and addictions- not even about the liver problems than nearly killed him eleven years ago - but it's not hard to take a guess.

"If you really care, it's all there in the writing, in the songs and in the books. It might take some effort, but it's not my job to spoon-feed the world. Think for yourself, as George Harrison said. Smart guy. I miss him."

His son and other companions agree: in the days and years after his homemade rehab stint, he worked with all manner of musicians before going back to the security and familiarity of the Doors. His album collaborating with Harrison came in 1987 and was considered a great work by critics and fans of both. The cover featured marble statues of the two in a museum, a tart comment on how they felt they were being forced to behave.

"I gave my statue to a friend. It was real marble, handcarved by an artist from Salisbury."

"Yeovil," one of his friends cuts in. "The Salisbury guy did the cover art for Berlin-Prague-Istanbul."

The album she refers to was recorded after a trip through the Eastern Bloc just before the USSR collapsed. 'Bad times', Morrison called it at the time, although he was glad to discover many secret Doors fans behind the Iron Curtain.

At this point in the interview, the phone rings. The friend answers. It is another Beatle: Mr Lennon. As the story goes, John was coming from Jim's birthday party in 1980 when a man called Mark Chapman tried to kill him. The two have, perhaps understandably, been good friends since then.

"I might have died," Lennon recalled later "but the driver bringing us back from Jim's party noticed the guy as he crossed the street. The police and ambulance were there before he'd emptied the gun."

There are rumours that one of Jim's friends was the driver and was also shot in an attempt to help the Beatle. Other rumours put Dion Morrison at the scene, but why a six-year-old would be there has never been explained. Many hoped Yoko Ono's post-divorce book would shed some light on the matter, but she stayed quiet. Now she's back with John, it doesn't seem likely we'll ever know.

In fact, although Morrison does his plugging with a certain sense of aplomb and style, I left him with the feeling that the more one knows about him, the more one realises one doesn't know him at all.